​After a while my eyelids started getting heavy and I could no longer keep track of what Dr. Alvarez was saying. My mind would wander away mid-sentence and when it returned she’d be using multisyllabic words that were foreign and incomprehensible. It had been a long week, and a long night, and now that my fear was beginning to wear off, the exhaustion was seeping in.

Dr. Alvarez caught me yawning.

“You going to let these kids sleep, or what?” she asked Cooper.

He jumped.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “C’mon, I’ll show you to your room.”

“You’re not letting us go?” asked Li.

“It’s not like that,” said Cooper. “We’ve got something to discuss tomorrow. We could put you up in a hotel overnight, but there are perfectly comfortable accommodations within the facility.”

Perfectly comfortable accommodations turned out to be a cold concrete room with two cots and a bathroom.

“This is going to earn you a one star review on Trip Advisor,” said Li.

“Very funny,” said Cooper. “Button on the wall over there will call somebody if you end up needing anything. I’ll send fresh clothes down in a second. Soap and toiletries are in the bathroom.”

“Dibs on the first shower,” said Li. I winced. The floor in there would be a muddy mess by the time I got my turn.

“So,” I said, “do you give this tour to all the rangers when they find a tablet?”

Cooper blinked.

“Wait,” he said, “you think this happens to everybody?”

“Happened to me twice already,” I pointed out, “and I’ve only been here two years.”

He shook his head. “Not to add to your bloated ego by telling you that you’re special, but this is a once-in-a-decade occurrence. The vast majority of rangers go their entire career without finding anything out of the ordinary.”

I looked at Li.

“Go get the clothes,” she told Cooper. “If you need me I’ll be checking the shower for cameras.”

She wasn’t kidding. After Cooper left, I followed her into the bathroom and found her scouring the corners of the ceiling.

“Find anything?”

“Nope,” she said. “They’ve probably got bugs in the vents.”

“Do you believe him?”

“About what?”

“That nobody ever finds anything in the forest?”

“Sure, maybe. I never heard about it.”

She balanced on the rim of the tub, examining the rings holding up the shower curtain.

“Look,” she said, “we have no reason to think they’re being honest. I think they’re putting on an act, all this buddy-buddy shit, trying to make us feel at home, feel like we’re part of the team. I’m not buying it. They’re covering something up.”

After wilting a few seconds beneath her raptor gaze, I nodded.

“That’s what I’m worried about right now,” said Li. “That and Zip. Fuck the tablet. I don’t care anymore. I just want to know that we’re getting out of here, and that Zip’s alive.”

While she showered I had another crisis of willpower, imagining her stripped bare, the hot water steaming off her skin. I thought about going to the door, asking — did she mind if I joined her?

Stupid.

Any guy would have these thoughts, I told myself.

When she finally emerged, wrapped in a towel, her legs clean and wet and exposed, something must have shown on my face, because she paused.

“What?” she asked.

I yanked my eyes up and planted them on her face, my tongue frozen at the base of my mouth.

“Oh. I get it.”

“Nothing,” I said. “Sorry. No. I mean, no. Not that.”

“Am I going to be safe sleeping in the same room with you?” she asked.

“I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.

She laughed. “It’s your turn, bud. Believe I used up all the hot water.”

She hadn’t, of course. It was like a hotel: you could stay in the shower for hours and the heat would never fade. I stood under the water and closed my eyes and let my skin turn red. The first shower after an expedition, I always cranked the heat way up, until it hurt, because it felt like the dirt and toxins of the forest had worked their way deep into my pores. I had to roast myself, all the grime and dead skin peeling away, and emerge like a molting lizard with a fresh new exterior.

Li was already asleep when I finished. Her eyes were closed, her mouth ajar. For a minute or two I stood there and looked at her. Then I shook myself, finished toweling off, and pulled on a pair of boxers Cooper had provided.

I fell unconscious within seconds of slipping under the covers.

In the middle of the night I heard a noise and woke up. Li wasn’t in her bed. Her empty sheets were pulled aside, tangled. Light trickled around the edges of the bathroom door. I could hear the fan in the bathroom whining.

“Hey,” I called, “you alright in there?”

Nothing. I waited a few seconds. Still no response.

She probably couldn’t hear me over the fan.

I guess, in a way, I’d never lost my fear of the dark. Back in my apartment, I sometimes spent nights staring at the dark rectangle of my bedroom doorway, imagining what’d I’d do if someone — something? — glided into view. Something tall. Something even darker than the black rectangle out of which it emerged, except for a pair of gleaming, predatory eyes. The fear made no sense. But maybe that was the problem: to make a rational judgment about the safety of your surroundings, you needed sensory data, which darkness denied.

When I listened closely, I thought I heard a tapping noise. I held my breath and inclined my head, trying to locate the source of the sound.

It was probably a pipe, or something to do with the air conditioning. I had sounds like this back in my apartment complex too. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep.

Tap. Tap tap. Tap tap tap.

The bathroom door swung open, slamming against the wall, and I snapped up to look. It was Junior, eyes shining black, with blood positively gushing from his mouth. The blood came out between his teeth in a torrent, spreading across the floor in sticky waves, and I knew that it would fill the room and drown me if it went on long enough.

“Tetris,” said Junior through the rush of blood. “Do you understand now? Do you understand, Tetris?”

“Understand what?” I shouted, standing as the red tide rose, lapping at the edges of my cot. “Understand WHAT?”

“Tetris!”

I looked down and saw that the blood had vanished. The room was dark, the bathroom still. Li sat in bed, rubbing her eye with a fist.

“What the fuck, dude?”

“Sorry,” I said, lying back down. “Just a nightmare.”

I curled up under the sheets, my heart still pounding.

“I’ve never heard you talk in your sleep,” said Li.

“Hmm,” I mumbled.

“That better not become a habit,” she said. “You can’t shout like that in the forest.”